In mid-17th-century Amsterdam—a unique haven of tolerance in Europe, known appreciatively as the “Jerusalem of the North”—a twenty-four-year-old Jewish thinker by the name of Baruch Spinoza would be summarily banished from his religious community.

The case against the young philosopher rested on his record of forthright and indisputably heretical contentions. Among them were that (a) the Creator God revered by the Jews had created, in a word, nothing; that (b), to the contrary, God and nature—in the philosopher’s unique semantics, “God, or nature”—were but two words for a single worldly substance; that (c), in blatant contradiction of established religious and philosophical truths, the physical human body and the immortal human soul were not separate entities but, rather, one inseparable corpus; and that (d) humans altogether lacked free will. Concerning the last point, true freedom according to the young Spinoza was to be measured solely by the degree to which humans became aware that both their thoughts and their actions were not free, but instead wholly predetermined.

These ideas, and others like them, would send rapid shockwaves through Western thought, achieving for the young dissident a reputation for sharpness and bravado that would soon spread outward from elitist philosophical precincts to society at large. No less prized was the brand of biblical criticism—built on rational analysis—that the philosopher would propose in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theological-Political Treatise, 1670).

And indeed Baruch Spinoza (1632–1670) was an exceptional thinker, and his thought is still relevant today. But before entering more deeply into his story, we should note from the start a couple of puzzling ironies. For one thing: despite being the author of a philosophical system based precisely on a vision of God—albeit one radically different from the Creator God of the Bible—Spinoza would become acclaimed not as a mere doubter of the divine but as a boldly outright atheist. For another: although he lived and taught in a society where freedom of conscience already existed and was widely practiced, he would be forever adulated as a lone pathbreaking hero of freethinking rationality and freedom of conscience.

Which in turn raises questions. Was the philosopher Spinoza really a free spirit of rationality, forced by close-minded enemies to flee a punitive and benighted society? And does the thought of the philosopher Spinoza really bear the hallmarks of originality, intellectual rigor, coherence, and honesty that should underlie all philosophy worthy of the name? Or is it also conceivable that, rather than being read by his admirers over the centuries as closely and accurately as possible, he has too often been read—or, rather, misread, and idolized—on false grounds, and toward false ends?

Let’s begin with a bit more about the author’s early life.

Baruch Spinoza was born to parents who had managed to flee Portugal during the period when the Inquisition was hunting down “converso” Jews who, after having been converted to Christianity (in most cases, forcibly), had subsequently fallen under suspicion by the Church of having secretly reverted to Judaism. Along with other such seekers of asylum, Baruch’s father, Miguel de Espinosa, a well-to-do merchant, would find refuge in the tolerant city of Amsterdam, where a small Jewish community had been welcomed on condition of its compliance with rules laid down by the local magistrate. Among those requirements was the prohibition of any unorthodox practice of Judaism.

In Amsterdam, the young Spinoza, after a carefully designed education at the Jewish community’s religious school, joined his father’s business, thus coming into contact with Christian merchants who quickly befriended him. Some among these individuals adhered to no established religion, instead professing a form of mysticism according to which God revealed Himself to man not through institutionalized religion but through an inner experience of Christ’s spirit. With the passage of time, in tune with that theme but in his own distinctly secular vocabulary, Spinoza, too, would express the need to achieve a “knowledge of the spirit’s union with the whole of Nature,” and on that basis “to form a society that enables as many people as possible to achieve [the same understanding] no less easily and surely.” (On the Improvement of the Understanding, published posthumously ca. 1677).

After his father’s death, and under the influence of some former crypto-Jews, notably Juan de Prado and Uriel da Costa, the young Spinoza became more familiar with a skeptical view of God’s creation of the world and would begin on his own to distance himself from his community. Correlatively, his burgeoning doubts concerning free will became increasingly open and doctrinaire. Breaking with centuries-old certitudes about the Creator God who left man free to choose between good and evil, he would assert that “there is nothing contingent in the nature of beings”—that is, there was no possibility of something either happening or not happening. On the contrary, he set out to demonstrate, as he would write in Book I of his Ethics, that “everything in [God, or Nature] has unfolded with eternal necessity and sovereign perfection,” and in a rigorously absolute form.

For the young philosopher, things were necessarily as they were, without any ultimate purpose. Indeed, to think that God had a will was to shut oneself away in the “asylum of ignorance,” attributing an intention to things when in fact (as he professed to have shown) they were incapable of being explained rationally. Spinoza’s definition of freedom thus lay in the negation of any and all final goals or causes, understanding the role of necessity in everything that exists, and accepting nature’s pre-determination of our thoughts and actions.

As for the Hebrew Bible, it was itself no more than a story based on the imagination of the men who wrote it at a certain time and in a certain place, without any further—let alone any universal—dimension or significance. In the absence of freedom, all that remained was for humans to understand the impossibility of things being otherwise than they were and to seek the contentment useful to preserving man in his being.

Having thus rejected the idea of the soul’s immortality in favor of an intuitive participation in the totality of God, or Nature, Spinoza offered up a feeling: “We feel and experience that we are eternal” (emphasis added). But he would never succeed in sharing this feeling—precisely because it ran contrary to his own rational explanation of the, to him, unwilled world.

Spinoza thereby offended his community on two grounds. For one thing, Jews who in Amsterdam had finally been able to return (quietly) to the practice of their religion and its laws were scandalized by ideas that were in complete contradiction of the Bible. For another thing, more concrete and no less dangerous, Jews had been admitted to Amsterdam precisely on condition that they tolerate no deviance from the stated rules.

Thus, it fell out that on July 27, 1656, having ignored the warnings of his community’s lay steering committee, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was sentenced to a ḥerem—a particularly stringent ban—for devising and teaching his utterly heterodox ideas. And this became the story that, over the succeeding centuries, would be turned into the stuff of anti-religious legend: a young genius, persecuted by fanatical rabbis for the ultimate “sin” of freedom of conscience, had been reduced to earning a meager livelihood grinding optical lenses from glass.

With one exception, however: contrary to the legend, missing in this case was the heroic martyr himself—since Spinoza, well aware of his heterodoxy, had already foreseen and prepared for his departure. Having joined the circle of his liberal Christian friends, he would continue studying with Franciscus van den Enden, a defrocked Jesuit priest, and sharpening his arguments against, with special force, Hebrew Scripture.

To this subject we may now turn.

From the early 16th century onward, the dual advent of the Protestant Reformation and movable-type printing had helped to make the Bible widely accessible in Europe. The holy texts, long considered sacred to the point of untouchability, now became subject to the imperatives of critical examination, sifted for their chronological reliability and tested for the degree of their adherence to the rules of grammar, philology, and reason.

Although Spinoza himself has been often presented as the inventor of biblical criticism, in developing his approach to the biblical text he was in fact preceded by many humanists, the most famous being the French priest Richard Simon. Spinoza was thus adding a stone to an edifice already under construction. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he would in retrospect present that stone as a new method of interpreting Scripture-through-Scripture, free of all prejudice as the critic placed the power of reason at the service of exegesis. “Knowledge . . . of almost all the contents of Scripture,” he wrote, “must be derived from Scripture alone, just as knowledge of nature must be derived from nature itself.” And at the heart of this method, he made clear, was the importance of context:

The historical investigation must expose . . . the life, manners, and preoccupations of the author of each [biblical] book; what he was, on what occasion, at what time, for whom, and in what language he at last wrote.

What honest reader could possibly object to such a project, or its conceptualization? Already, one might think, Spinoza’s quest for the union of spirit and nature, free from any input of divine revelation, and meant for everyone, should have exempted him from any suspicion of either bias or animosity. And yet, in the Tractatus, both hatred and bias would indeed be present, powerfully so, and aimed against a single people: the Jews.

For Spinoza, the “Scripture” under examination was exclusively the Tanakh: that is, the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament”—because, he declared with false modesty, he did not know Greek and so was unable to apply his method also to the “New Testament.” (He was lying; a letter by him proves that he knew Greek so well that he even found Hebraisms in a text of the Gospels.) To put it more broadly, and more correctly, his aim was only to desacralize the Hebrew Bible, and thereby to undermine the authority of theologians who relied on it; in doing so, he simultaneously sought to avoid any frontal attack on Christianity. His Latin motto was “Caute”: be cautious.

In thus aiming specifically at the Jews, he had recourse to a number of devices for showing that, in contrast to Christianity, Judaism not only lacked any universal dimension but was actually a selfish religion that radiated hatred toward all others. Primary among his devices was a sleight-of-hand move to discredit his targets before analyzing them, thereby catching the eye and influencing the judgment of a reader prior to, or without any need for, reasoned argument.

In pursuit of this end, Spinoza makes repeated use of the phrases hoc est and id est (i.e.): two Latin expressions meaning “so it is” or “it just is.” For instance: several times in the Tractatus he avers that the supposedly divine “chosenness” or “election” of the Jewish people amounted only to a concern for their temporal felicity, “i.e. the state” of the Hebrews, a construct designed only to ensure their access to such low pleasures and material goods as eating, sleeping, and copulating.

But, one might ask, if the election of the Jewish people was simply God’s “choice” of a certain people, set in certain circumstances and destined to live in a certain space at a certain time for a certain purpose, how did Spinoza find out about this decision by God—especially since, as he also insists, God has no will?

His answer? None of that matters; it’s just the way “it” is. As a sole example of “evidence,” Spinoza offers up the weak observation that when money-savvy Jews came into a windfall, they would thank God—an assertion that reveals precisely nothing new about Judaism (whose teachings abound with expressions of gratitude for God’s goodness) but something about the author’s own unhesitating and telltale adoption of a derogatory Christian trope alleging a singularly Jewish attachment to money. But, again, no matter: for him, “the Jew” has always been thus: devoid of reason, prototypically selfish, wallowing in material pleasures, mechanically observing obsolete rites and ceremonies.

There is much more. Since it would not suffice simply to denounce Jews as hating and hateful, Spinoza undertakes to identify and repudiate the values that have supposedly upheld all that enmity. For this exercise, he turns to the Hebrew prophets.

In biblical Judaism, the prophet is the voice of God, transmitting the divine word with a view to establishing justice on earth, charging Jewish society with a message of ethical responsibility, and inviting other peoples to abandon idolatry so that all can participate in the messianic era. Spinoza, however, sees things otherwise, opening his discussion with a sweepingly illogical declaration according to which, first, nothing less than “the authority of the [entire] Bible . . . depends on the authority of the prophets” and, second, that “the opinions of the prophets are of little importance to us.”

Not only is this statement self-contradictory, it is also glaringly irrelevant: the biblical prophets were not interpreters but messengers, and they did not hold opinions. Nor, in claiming to apply his rational method to the books of the prophets, does our urgent advocate of context say anything about the actual historical circumstances in which the prophets lived and preached or even mention the stark disparities between the prophets who lived before the wholesale transfer of the conquered Hebrews to Babylonia circa 590 BCE and their fellows after the end of the exile. Having declared context to be a decisive factor in understanding the biblical text, Spinoza himself proceeds to cherry-pick quotations, to deny the ethical dimension of the prophetic texts, and to present prophecy as a vague knowledge of things based on sensitive perception, common opinions, and hearsay and the prophets themselves, no less randomly, as authoring “laws in the name of God” (though he fails to present a single such law); as guardians of peace; and as rank troublemakers deriving personal benefit from the exercise of their own “supreme right to command.”

This, too, is not all. In stark contrast to his derogation of the Old Testament prophets, who “wrote laws in the name of God but not of Christ,” Spinoza proceeds to laud the Christian apostles in the New Testament as, no less, prophets themselves, focusing especially on the apostle Paul as not only a prophet but also a philosopher par excellence: one, moreover, who regularly appealed to God to obtain miracles and who in his epistles pointed to the specific miracles performed by Jesus.

Since, however, God according to Spinoza cannot “use” words, or miracles, or any other created thing, and does not “act” to begin with, how can we think that Jesus himself, presented by the philosopher as uniquely privileged to communicate with God “spirit to spirit,” would have indulged in the manipulations of a miracle-worker or any other created thing? Answer: Spinoza avoids any mention of the historical Jesus whose miracles are celebrated in the Gospels, writing only about the God who, being absolute, has no will, and the Christ whose “spirit” is expected to lead the ancient Hebrew patriarchs to “freedom.”

A second set of Spinoza’s devices consists of deliberate confusions. For instance, throughout his Tractatus, this renowned Hebraist and expert in ancient history crudely amalgamates such distinctive terms as Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, and Pharisees. Historically speaking, “Hebrews” is appropriate for the era of the patriarchs; “Israelites” refers exclusively to the inhabitants of the kingdom of Israel, which disappears from history with the Assyrian conquest; and both yield to “Jews,” that is, the remnants of the kingdom of Judah on their return to the land of Israel from Babylonian exile. As for the Pharisees, they are a religious and political group that emerges during the Hasmonean period and ends up eclipsing its opponents during the Roman period.

But Spinoza the biblical critic displays no hesitancy in referring haphazardly to “the first Jews at the time of Moses”; finds it proper to lump together “Jews,” “Hebrews,” and “Pharisees” in ostensibly the same timeframe; appears simply to overlook the entire moral and intellectual evolution that spanned the many centuries from the time of the exodus from Egypt to the time of Philo of Alexandria to the time of Abraham Ibn Ezra, Rashi, and Moses Maimonides; and altogether ignores the titanic influence of the talmudic rabbis and their commentators. So far as a reader might conclude, they are all the contemporaries of one Baruch Spinoza.

When it comes to lack of scholarly rigor, it would be hard to do worse than this. What is more, the resultant historical compression plays also into popular anti-Jewish prejudices, including those drawn from the Christian arsenal of insults (like the association of Jews with money-lust). In this vein, Spinoza heightens the Christian valence of the term “Pharisee,” making it suggestive of hateful hypocrites hiding behind false expressions of religious piety. “If,” he writes, “the Pharisees retained [their Jewish] ceremonies, for the most part at least, after the loss of the state, they did so less to please God than to oppose the Christians.” The philosopher also retains and reproduces the Gospel rebuke of such scoundrels: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (Matthew 23:13).

Spinoza’s sheer malignity is revealed here. Indeed, as the British scholar Robert Travers-Herford (1860–1950) noted, “Pharisaism was already several centuries old in principle, if not in name, when Christianity appeared, and it has continued to exist in principle, if not in name, right up to the present day.” If Spinoza’s unabashed anachronism is astonishing, and his malevolent intention plain to see, he may thus simply have trusted the anti-Jewish bigots among his readers to overlook the inconsistencies in his argument. Concerning this particular intuition, he has been proved right.

Among other inventions in this realm, one technique, aimed at disqualifying Jewish religious practices, ties together things that are wholly unrelated. Attacking circumcision, the sign of God’s eternal covenant with Abraham and his descendants—and, in the judgment of the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), a ritual that in its worthy purpose is parallel to the Christian practice of baptism—Spinoza offers instead a burlesque equivalence between circumcision and . . . the wearing of a Chinese braid (a hairstyle forced on the Chinese by the conquering Manchus). More seriously, and in an especially perverse move, he presents biblical kingship as an imposed theocracy, thus suggesting a complete identification between politics and religion and supposedly explaining two otherwise disparate Jewish faults: the ancient Hebrews’ exclusive love for their homeland and their descendants’ vicious intolerance of others:

These two feelings, of piety and hatred toward other nations, were nourished and maintained by daily worship so that they had to transform into a second nature. . . . This daily execration had to give rise to continuous hatred [with the consequence] that the other nations had to feel an extremely strong hatred for them.

In these two sentences, the thrice-repeated “had to” labors in vain to pass off cheap prejudice as binding truth.

In reality, Judaism was and has always remained anti-theocratic. As the 19th-century French philosopher Adolphe Franck pointed out, “Moses’ aim was not to found a theocracy . . . but a society that was both political and religious, in which all the members, equal before God and equal before the law, were to be equal among themselves.” Although God in the Torah is the sole source of legal principles—including the stark division of roles between the political and the religious realms—He is neither the day-to-day legislator nor a stakeholder in the exercise of power, either directly or through an earthly representative.

For Spinoza, it seems, introducing the concept of theocracy must have been useful in portraying the Hebrews as a warlike people bound to their divine monarch. He supports this particular charge by claiming that all were obliged to serve under arms from the age of twenty to the age of sixty: a perfect untruth that he then redoubles by asserting that the call to arms tolerated no exception—“nullo except.” None, that is, if one turns a blind eye to the list of exemptions from military service set out with care and precision in Chapter 20 of Deuteronomy.

Similarly self-contradictory statements abound. Having informed us at the beginning of the Tractatus that the foundations of their religion softened and feminized the souls of the Jews, Spinoza soon pivots 180 degrees to describe them instead as fanatical warriors who “voluntarily lived isolated and without trade with other men, enclosed within their borders and cut off from the rest of the world.” Meanwhile, Spinoza grimly volunteers, even after losing their state “and thus being no longer bound to obey God’s commandments,” the Jews “have been left with a sole identifying mark: their hatred of the Other, which, in their daily prayers, rises to vocal execration.”

As for living isolated and without trade, the adventuresome seafarers of the tribe of Zebulun would have vigorously contest this ignorant slur. As for the hatred of others, so would King Solomon and so would King Hiram of Tyre, Solomon’s close partner in construction and trade. And as for those execrating daily prayers, the text cited by Spinoza tends more to undermine than to support his claim: “Let there be no hope for the slanderers,” it pleads, “and may all wickedness perish instantly . . . and may You uproot, break, crush, and subdue the kingdom of evil speedily in our days. . . .”

Who would not wish to eradicate the wickedness of the earth? Nor does the Bible postulate the irredeemable moral otherness of foreigners or strangers, despite what Spinoza urges his Christian readers to believe. To the contrary, Deuteronomy mandates that the public reading of the Law in the sabbatical year be conducted in the presence of all the people in the land: not only the Jewish “men, women, and children” but also “the strangers in your midst, that they may hear and so learn to revere the Lord and to observe faithfully every word of His teaching.” In further blatant contrast to Spinoza’s construction of a Jewish system of belief devoted to the wholesale hatred of foreigners, the laws in the Bible concerning foreigners, too numerous to mention here, require that each individual be treated with the same justice as that prevailing within Hebrew society.

Eventually, not only does Spinoza contradict himself from one chapter to another, but sometimes he appears to reason from pure untruths. Thus, he informs us that despite the ancient Hebrews’ happiness when living according to God’s law, they were headed for loss. And why would the “God-king” abandon His subjects and let His kingdom sink into ruin? Basing himself on a faulty translation of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, Spinoza holds that the fall of the Israelite kingdom owed to misbehavior on the part of some Levites serving in the first Temple. Actually, the biblical text associates a variety of outrageous and punishable activities with worshippers not of God but of Moloch: of all unlikely parties, a pagan Canaanite deity.

In brief, the more meticulously one reads Spinoza, the more obvious become his intellectual dishonesties. And those dishonesties range far—far enough to encompass the historical lie that can serve as our final case study.

Some background here: Baruch Spinoza was a great admirer of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who had married in 1469. Two decades later, in 1492, the Catholic monarchs offered the Jews of Spain a choice: mass conversion to Christianity, or mass expulsion from Spain. To Spinoza, a century-and-a-half later, either path would have promised a happy consequence—namely, the disappearance of the Jews:

When a king of Spain once forced the Jews to adopt the religion of the kingdom or go into exile, most Jews adopted the Catholic religion. With those who had converted, all the privileges of the original Spaniards were conceded, and they were judged worthy of the same honors, they immediately mingled with the Spaniards, so that soon afterward no [Jewish] trace or memory remained of them.

History, of course, invalidates this bewildering fable, which would not have fooled any of Spinoza’s contemporary Jewish readers. In writing these lines, he had deliberately ignored and excised the “purity of blood” statutes of 1449, imposed after two historically brutal waves of forced mass conversions, the first in 1391 and the second in the wake of a 1413–14 staged Christian-Jewish disputation in Tortosa, Spain.

According to the 1449 statutes, any converso whose Jewish ancestry could be proved to any degree was now to be considered a false Christian and an “impure” subject, and therefore altogether prohibited from holding public office. The 16th-century jurist Juan Arce de Otalora justified this racial obsession:

The Jews, by their crime [of deicide] have lost all kind of nobility and dignity, and the blood of the one who delivered Christ [to the Cross] is so infected that his sons, nephews, and descendants, as if they were born of infected blood, must be deprived of and excluded from honors, offices, and dignities. . . . The infamy of their fathers will always accompany them.

Spinoza knew about these laws, as well as the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution of descendants of converted Jews; these were the circumstances that had led his own ancestors to leave Iberia for Amsterdam. But he did not simply ignore such attacks on conversos; he wanted his readers to believe, against all truth, that many other Jews had so successfully integrated themselves into Spanish society as to “disappear” through conversion; and this, for him, was a good thing. By contrast, those he regarded as the backsliders among the Jews were themselves wholly responsible for the hatred they had provoked in Catholic Spain; they were threatening the kingdom’s political harmony, and therefore they must be excluded from society in a politically sanctioned way.

According to Spinoza, the most adequate solution in this case was expulsion: a universal remedy that he proposed for any conquered population that had become troublesome. The Ethics states: “Anything that is in nature and that we deem to be evil, that is, that we deem capable of preventing ourselves from existing and enjoying a reasonable life, we are allowed to remove it from us in the way that seems safest.” As Jews had no place in a healthy state, they must be removed. Logically, Spinoza concluded, they should be condemned to banishment.

Did all of his contemporaries in Europe think similarly? Not quite. From the middle of the previous century, the Spanish writer Fadrique Furió Ceriol had dared to argue, while the pyres of the Spanish Inquisition were blazing:

There are no more than two lands in the world, that of the good and that of the bad. All good men, be they Jews, Moors, Gentiles, Christians, or any other sect, belong to the same land, are of the same house and of the same blood, and the same goes for the evil ones.

Unable or undisposed to draw any such distinction, Spinoza denied it to the Jews, whom he despised and to whom he would have denied every place among men—even while asserting that hatred was a passion that should never find a home in the work of any philosopher. According to him, the existence of Jews had depended solely on their once-ownership of a state and the ordained practice of that state’s religious rites; once they lost both their state and their Temple, they should no longer exist as Jews.

Unfortunately for him, they did exist, and right before his eyes in Amsterdam: still wary, but free, respected, and in some cases even prosperous. In striving to rescue and preserve his theory, blinded by a hatred that he labored to dress in the garb of reason, he denied reality. Philosophy and critical thinking gave way to wild passion and prejudice.

What Spinoza articulated, and advocated, was nothing less than open anti-Semitism.

His first goal, as he saw it, was to prove the total lack among his former coreligionists of any talent for rational reasoning or theorizing and, hand in hand with this, their hatred of others. The second goal was to convince society to shun and eject them. Social cohesion would be best ensured by giving everyone else a single common enemy.

Being born a Jew was, for Spinoza, a permanent internal torture. In reasoning, he had found the best way to escape his own condition. His reasoning had led him to a perfect syllogism: every philosopher reasons; the Jew does not reason; Spinoza is a philosopher; therefore, Spinoza cannot be a Jew. And yet, through its stubborn belief in the distinction between God and man, and in the existence of free will, Judaism had nevertheless defied the Spinozist system. Herein, therefore, lay the third goal of his anti-Semitism: namely, to fight against the Jews by discrediting Jewish thought, which was the very contradiction of his own.

The modern French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) summed up this attitude in one sentence: “it is first against all other men that we love the men with whom we live.” As Spinoza, philosopher of the universal, lived with all men, he had to live against the Jews, to whom he had refused access to the universal. Thus denying Judaism’s own universalist dimension, and anxious to turn the theme of chosenness against the Jews, Spinoza decrees that their social harmfulness was constitutive of their very being: “The joy [a Jew] derives from believing himself superior, if it is not childish, comes only from envy or wickedness.” Granted, he concedes, the laws of the Torah had been “revealed and prescribed to the Jews alone”; but when they rejoiced at this divine favor, they activated in others the only possible response, again expounded by Spinoza in the Ethics: “If we imagine that someone enjoys something that only one [person] can possess, we will strive to make it happen that [the one person] no longer possesses it.”

For its part, traditional Judaism regards God’s law very differently: as a means to divert, into codified and ritualized activities, certain vital but contending human impulses that are indispensable to creation as a whole and in particular to the survival of humanity and the preservation of peace among men. Salient among these human impulses is the inclination (yetser) toward evil (in Hebrew, yetser ha-ra). Only education in the observance of the law, which tempers the evil inclination and nourishes the opposing human inclination toward the good (yetser ha-tov), can balance the scales and encourage us toward service in making the world a better place.

Even today, almost all philosophers believe that Spinoza invented the concept of conatus—the effort to persevere in one’s being and to maintain and even increase one’s power of being. It is just a revised version of the Jewish yetser. Getting rid of the Jews intellectually was thus also a way for Spinoza, the consummate intellectual, to erase an intellectual debt: not only his final goal but also his enduring achievement, ruinously bleak as it is. By bringing together the various strands of anti-Jewish animus and grounding them in rationalistic arguments, he was the first to conceive the ideology of a secular anti-Semitism.

Moreover, far from being a victim of that same ideology, as some mistakenly contend, Spinoza was its creator. In devoting an important part of his work to proving that anti-Judaism could and must be founded on reason and on texts, he was himself forced to build his own criticism of the “Old Testament” on inventions, lies, deliberate misinterpretations, mistranslations, confusions, and contradictions, and to allow himself to express an obsessive resentment. His own discourse on Jews and Judaism was more ideology than philosophy, and his false demonstrations were propaganda more than knowledge.

And yet this discourse proved devastatingly influential. Through what he presented as reasoning, Spinoza suggested that to be happy, a country must somehow get rid of its Jews. Although he cannot be accused of having explicitly incited their physical destruction, he sowed seeds that would germinate over the decades and eras, emerging in the 19th century in the form of ideas sedulously cultivated by such German philosophers as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (but not Nietzsche), and becoming in the 20th century massively lethal. They are still thriving, and growing, before our eyes.

In this sense, the sheer persistent modernity of Spinoza is undeniable. He remains, alas, our contemporary.

This essay draws on themes discussed in Henry Mechoulan’s recent book, Spinoza démasqué (“Spinoza Unmasked,” Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2022).